Statistics Bite Back.

The New York Times reported 'In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them', which demonstrates some of the realities of the statistics involved on the internet. Pop up windows, formerly untracked, are being tracked. As for myself, I block them with SeaMonkey - so I'm not part of the 5 million web users who disappeared overnight:

...The disappearing act came when Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading company in measuring Internet traffic, sharply cut its previously reported statistics for the financial Web site Entrepreneur.com to 2 million unique visitors in April, from 7.6 million...

Maybe you and your browser are. And that's almost 66% of all the web traffic they were reporting.

Oops.

This is a big deal for web site publishing, especially for print magazines which are eyeing the web statistics for web advertising, but are unable to establish a verifiable 'circulation'. In this way, statistics seem a step more real for advertisers... and speaking of that... Google is reporting a click fraud rate of less than 2%.

So if Google Ads show up in a popup window, are they counted as page views?

Bad news for the annoying marketers. Good news for the internet.